Been having a couple of episodes in the past month in which my Hardrives switch letters And therefore my PC Boots up with NTLDR is missing. The first episode took me maybe two hours to figure out and fix, this past morning, same problem , I was able to fix in under 15 minutes. So now I would like to be Able to permanently fix so it won't happen again.
Scenario: PC in the A.M. won't shut down or reboot even if I use alt/con/del .
So I manually shut down power button only to discover the dreaded ‘ntldr is missing' upon restart in the initial bios screen mode of my Windows XP ( details in my signature).
So out comes the XP disc and I see after using the R repair function, that my HD lettering has been moved around.
My C: drive Main (with O/S and is partitioned with D Drive as well)- (160GB) is on a SATA IDE cable (red), and my other two Hard Drives are then (after the CDROM drives (E:/F: drives ), numbered G: (80 GB- Picture and video folder) and H:drive 80 GB MP3's .., (actually the H drive –I have lettered M drive for Music… ) .
So after my PC reports NTLDR is missing, I find that my C: drive is now E: and the rest of the drives are all out of order as well. BUT the important C drive of course probably can't be found because it is now not the Normal C drive.., that the bios is looking for .
In order to fix all of this I pull the power cord and outside panel and unplug the one IDE cable which is loading both 80 MB HD's to Motherboard and restart PC.
It now finds C drive with NTLDR missing of which I now use the famous fix of –
Copy E:\i386\ntlder C:\ ‘enter
Copy E:\i386\ntdetect.com C:\ ‘enter
So … All is well again.. The Hard drives do not have a problem with scan disk, and chkdsk ( file repair,) as well I do regular maintenance on these drives every month or less.,, The problem seems to lie in the waking up of the PC in morning, and this jarring effect of manually turning off the power button to get it to wake up seems to be the problem. I usually leave the PC on 24 hours a day and the power saving techniques I use are having the monitor shut off after 10 minutes. and the Hard drives never shut off.. During the daytime hours of 7am to 12 midnight this enables the PC to come to life rather quickly with a touch of the keyboard or move the mouse to wake. ( I also rfeboot the PC a few times during the course of the day to refresh as well).
My Virus program (F-SECURE) comes into play for updates and scanning around 5 am. We usually turn off the monitor manually after midnight instead of leaving the glowing screen on and waiting 10 minutes to auto shut off.
SO What should I be looking for in accordance to Computer maintenance beyond my own approach?????
Scenario: PC in the A.M. won't shut down or reboot even if I use alt/con/del .
So I manually shut down power button only to discover the dreaded ‘ntldr is missing' upon restart in the initial bios screen mode of my Windows XP ( details in my signature).
So out comes the XP disc and I see after using the R repair function, that my HD lettering has been moved around.
My C: drive Main (with O/S and is partitioned with D Drive as well)- (160GB) is on a SATA IDE cable (red), and my other two Hard Drives are then (after the CDROM drives (E:/F: drives ), numbered G: (80 GB- Picture and video folder) and H:drive 80 GB MP3's .., (actually the H drive –I have lettered M drive for Music… ) .
So after my PC reports NTLDR is missing, I find that my C: drive is now E: and the rest of the drives are all out of order as well. BUT the important C drive of course probably can't be found because it is now not the Normal C drive.., that the bios is looking for .
In order to fix all of this I pull the power cord and outside panel and unplug the one IDE cable which is loading both 80 MB HD's to Motherboard and restart PC.
It now finds C drive with NTLDR missing of which I now use the famous fix of –
Copy E:\i386\ntlder C:\ ‘enter
Copy E:\i386\ntdetect.com C:\ ‘enter
So … All is well again.. The Hard drives do not have a problem with scan disk, and chkdsk ( file repair,) as well I do regular maintenance on these drives every month or less.,, The problem seems to lie in the waking up of the PC in morning, and this jarring effect of manually turning off the power button to get it to wake up seems to be the problem. I usually leave the PC on 24 hours a day and the power saving techniques I use are having the monitor shut off after 10 minutes. and the Hard drives never shut off.. During the daytime hours of 7am to 12 midnight this enables the PC to come to life rather quickly with a touch of the keyboard or move the mouse to wake. ( I also rfeboot the PC a few times during the course of the day to refresh as well).
My Virus program (F-SECURE) comes into play for updates and scanning around 5 am. We usually turn off the monitor manually after midnight instead of leaving the glowing screen on and waiting 10 minutes to auto shut off.
SO What should I be looking for in accordance to Computer maintenance beyond my own approach?????
